Van abbemuseum

event

Heartland Film II

Artists films in relation to Heartland

14:00 - 15:30Free admission with museum ticket. It is also possible to buy a seperate ticket for the film programme for € 3,50.Presentation: Kerstin Niemann

Nancy Buchanan, California Stories (1983), 10 min

Nancy Buchanan took a job at the University of Wisconsin in 1982. There, she noticed that everyone seemed to believe various clichés about her home, Southern California. Armed with video, she asked natives of Wisconsin to reveal the "truth" about California, with fairly hilarious results. "Typical" Midwestern scenes background each interview.Directed, shot, and edited by Nancy BuchananEditing equipment generously provided by Janice TanakaMusic performed and recorded by Angelo Funicelli

Christopher Miner, The Best Decision Ever Made (2004), 17 min

Chrisopher Miner has made a narrative documentation about his grandmother's house right after she died. He is telling the story of his memories being with her in the house where she used to live until she died. Including the discussions with his father how they try to sell the house and the organizing around it. The film addresses a lot of questions about identity of place, the view from different generations as well as reflecting someone's life after this someone has passed away.

Christopher Miner, Isolated in Nature (2006), 3 min

Image of a sundown landscape in Tennessee with lightening coming through. Sound of a weather forecast radio station.

Artur Silva

Artur Silva's wall piece "The Wealth of the Regions" (2008) is on display in the Heartland exhibition of the Van Abbemuseum. As an artist, Silva is interested in the way people experience capitalism within different classes and groups in America, now and in other periods in history. His work is the result of his pursuit to understand, as an artist, these experiences as well as his own capitalist experience in America. He grew up in Brazil, but has lived his entire adult life in the United States.He brings both an insider and outsider perspective to bear his work. In his artistic practice he appropriate and modify images and sounds from mass media, and combine them with his own footage and photography to create videos and installations. These works explore advertising as a capitalistic tool to fuel consumerism. The role iconography plays in the oversimplified representation of cultures through images is an area of interest. Silva explains: "Through my work I explore my own struggle in a commodity-driven culture and how I negotiate my existence in this system."

Artur Silva, Cognitive Dissonance (2008), 1,5 min

It is a video with a character played by artist Artur Silva as a a model for Kawasaki commercial shot in Chicago. In a ridiculous and humorous way the video explores the bragging rights people seem to have over objects they own.

Artur Silva, Bling Project (2008), 2,5 min

Miss Rockaway Armada

Documentation of the performative weekend with Miss Rockaway Armada in Eindhoven in collaboration with Mu and Stroomhuis in Eindhoven.

"The Miss Rockaway Armada is both a collection of individuals and an idea. The crew can be called many things: artists, musicians, builders, travelers, organizers, dreamers. Ask one of the people who help build and move these crafts for the purpose, though, and you'll get many answers. But there are some things that we all agree on. We want to create: to invent a new sustainable way to travel, to demonstrate different ways of living and moving that are friendlier to the environment and to each other, to indulge in that essential urge to make something out of nothing. We want to meet people: to learn from new folks along the way, to teach what we know, to share our art, our music and our performance, and to make new friends. Finally, for adventure: to reclaim and reinvent the old American urge to strike out and discover the vast, mysterious land we inhabit and see it for ourselves. We grew up in small towns. We remember the bookmobile and the punk rock band that seeded little pieces of something else. And now, even though we moved to big cities and found people like us, we still live in a country that fights wars so it can consume more. We are taking the urge to flee and heading for the center. We want to meet people who aren't like us. We want to meet ourselves at age 16. We want to be a living, kicking model of an entirely different world — one that in this case happens to float."